Maxine Linial, PhD

Dr. Maxine Linial is a leader in the study of foamy viruses, a type of virus that infects cats, cows, horses and primates, including monkeys and, more recently, humans. She has led several projects designed to learn more about how foamy viruses replicate, change their genetic structure and jump from monkeys to humans. Foamy viruses are not known to cause disease. But they are important to study partly because of the story of HIV, which originated from a family of viruses that don’t cause disease in their natural hosts. Dr. Linial hopes to lay a foundation of knowledge for foamy viruses before they cause problems in people — rather than trying to play catchup as scientists needed to do when HIV arrived unexpectedly.